Current ways of delivering urban water and energy systems, waste management, transport, planning and governance are neither appropriate nor sufficiently resilient in the face of 21st century challenges. This resource-constrained, carbon-constrained world is beset by development pressures, including record levels of immigration to cities such as Melbourne. Twenty-first century cities need innovative technologies, products, designs and processes that can be updated and replaced when existing ones show signs of failure, as is now the case with much of our urban infrastructure. The first stage must be to support innovations, such as compact fluorescent tubes and solar panels, that are commercially available now and have a demonstrated level of performance that is clearly superior to other products.